Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?

homer.scrivium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 82 posts

Re: Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?

#41

Post by breezybottom »

tptacek wrote: post #10
oliculipolicula wrote: post #2

Sorry this could be offensive didn't mean to be.. Any Greek speakers who studied Homer in school here can share what are your favourite English translations? Prefer Lattimore or Fitzgerald as being closer to original?

Derek Thompson's Plain English podcast just had Emily Wilson on talking about comparisons between the translations, and quite a bit of the iconic lines of the Odyssey from the midcentury translations are kind of just made up. Like, "skilled in all ways of contending" from "man of many turns"; "the wanderer, harried for years on end" --- find that in the Greek?

The Abundance guy has a literature podcast? The grift never ends...

Re: Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?

#42

Post by dash2 »

AlanYx wrote: post #38
tptacek wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Derek Thompson's Plain English podcast just had Emily Wilson on talking about comparisons between the translations, and quite a bit of the iconic lines of the Odyssey from the midcentury translations are kind of just made up. Like, "skilled in all ways of contending" from "man of many turns"; "the wanderer, harried for years on end" --- find that in the Greek?

"wine dark sea" is the best example of this. It's a poetic/literary leap by Chapman and Pope that then became a functional convention in most subsequent translations. The alternative translations aren't any better though, at least in English.

The original is οινοπα ποντον which indeed is very close to wine-dark sea. Literally "wine-faced" where -faced is a metaphor for "having the appearance of".

Re: Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?

#44

Post by wavemode »

branon wrote: post #6

I got Robert Fitzgerald, wish it would tell me which passages were by which authors after I finished though ah, it does, to an extent at least - about 2/3rds down the front page, ctrl+f for "opening"

hello fellow Robert Fitzgerald-ian

I think it's fitting that a story that was originally an ancient poem, should sound ancient and poetic.

Re: Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?

#45

Post by KineticLensman »

JamesSwift wrote: post #34
npinsker wrote: post #7

“How much you enjoy the prose” doesn’t really seem like the metric by which we should rank these? I’d prefer to read whatever’s most faithful to the original, which isn’t measured here.

Translation = words + intent. Literal translation frequently loses the intent encoded into the chosen language, especially for creative writing. If I translate "youre a real piece of work" literally into another language, Ive likely lost the entire point of the phrase. Should we prefer that translation instead of one that either spells out the underhandedness of the comment in the other language? Or which replaces it…

Thiss is a very good example. Consider the difference between "he's hard working" and "he's hard work". My wife ran into this when some German co-workers were describing a colleague.

Re: Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?

#47

Post by boelboel »

rob74 wrote: post #19
oliculipolicula wrote: post #2

Sorry this could be offensive didn't mean to be.. Any Greek speakers who studied Homer in school here can share what are your favourite English translations? Prefer Lattimore or Fitzgerald as being closer to original?

I'm not really familiar with ancient or modern Greek, but according to https://speakgreektome.com/blog/ancient-vs-modern-greek/#hom... , people who can only read modern Greek need a translation too if they want to read Homer's works ("While reading, many words here and there will be familiar to a Greek or at least will make sense via etymological references, it’s impossible, though, for average folk to understand a t…

As someone who's only studied Ancient Greek I can say the reverse is true as well, not much use of my 5 years in HS when I'm in Greece.

Re: Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?

#48

Post by AlanYx »

dash2 wrote: post #42
AlanYx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"wine dark sea" is the best example of this. It's a poetic/literary leap by Chapman and Pope that then became a functional convention in most subsequent translations. The alternative translations aren't any better though, at least in English.

The original is οινοπα ποντον which indeed is very close to wine-dark sea. Literally "wine-faced" where -faced is a metaphor for "having the appearance of".

Literally "wine-faced" or "wine-eyed", yes. The problem with the literal wine-faced/wine-eyed is it doesn't convey luminosity/depth to readers, so it kind of misses the point. The missing context is that ancient wine was often unfiltered and cloudy, and diluted before being served.

"wine-looking" would be better for modern readers in terms of conveying the actual meaning, but again, it doesn't convey the actual idea Homer is getting at, and sounds awkward to repeat.

It's fun to think about alternatives far from the text like "garnet-hued sea", "sapphire-hued sea", "burgundy sea", but they all miss on either hue or clarity. "Lee-dark sea" is probably the closest, and hits the wine idea.

Re: Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?

#49

Post by nemo »

tptacek wrote: post #10
oliculipolicula wrote: post #2

Sorry this could be offensive didn't mean to be.. Any Greek speakers who studied Homer in school here can share what are your favourite English translations? Prefer Lattimore or Fitzgerald as being closer to original?

Derek Thompson's Plain English podcast just had Emily Wilson on talking about comparisons between the translations, and quite a bit of the iconic lines of the Odyssey from the midcentury translations are kind of just made up. Like, "skilled in all ways of contending" from "man of many turns"; "the wanderer, harried for years on end" --- find that in the Greek?

"man of many turns" is at least a better translation than "complicated man" which feels to me like a bit of a travesty to translate polytropos into. Polytropos literally has the roots of "many" and "turn" in it, "complicated" is not there. Lattimore was a literalist and his translation's weird for that but more fair to the Greek than what I've seen of Wilson's translation. Wilson takes the Fagles approach, but modernizes it.

For the record I can still recite the first book of Homer in Greek so I have opinions.

Re: Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?

#50

Post by curo »

npinsker wrote: post #7

“How much you enjoy the prose” doesn’t really seem like the metric by which we should rank these? I’d prefer to read whatever’s most faithful to the original, which isn’t measured here.

There's a section in the report "what's the most accurate translation" - tldr it's complicated. Presumably the top 8 translations by popularity pass some threshold of credibility.
Post reply on HN